IS END NEAR FOR DETROIT LABOR DISPUTE?

By: Mark Fitzgerald E&P Analyzes Latest Developments





Editor's note: Since this story was written last week, a third union ratified
contracts with the Detroit newspapers. Over the weekend, the Newspaper Guild of
Detroit, Local 22, overwhelmingly approved a new contract which will expire
Jan. 15, 2004, according to The Associated Press. The guild represent 450
newsroom employees and janitors.



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After five tumultuous years, the Detroit newspaper labor dispute appeared to finally be grinding to a halt last week as the pressmen's union became the second labor organization to ratify a contract and The Newspaper Guild's local president urged members to hold their noses and approve management's final contract offer at a meeting scheduled for yesterday.



While they hurt the newspapers with a boycott that still keeps circulation down by about one-third from pre-strike levels, the unions failed to halt production of the Detroit Free Press and The Detroit News in the early days of their walkout and then saw their hopes of a legal victory over the papers' management dashed by successive court rulings last summer.



Guild Local 22 President Lou Mleczko said the preservation of union contracts at the papers justifies ratification of a contract loaded with provisions that were once anathema to the union, such as an open shop.



Free Press employees would get annual 2% across-the-board wage increases under the proposed three-year contract. For almost all Guild employees at the News, there would be no automatic wage increases because only merit raises determined by management will be paid above the top contract minimum wage scale.



Two big Teamster locals and a small engravers union so far have resisted the demand by Detroit Newspapers Inc. that the unions let members vote on its final offer by Nov. 15. (Detroit Newspapers has been the joint operating agency for the dailies since 1989.)



"That's their deadline. I don't know if it's rhetoric or it's real," said Al Young, president of Detroit Mailers Local 2040. Young said that his Teamsters local wants a contract that would restore to their pre-strike levels the wages he said have been cut nearly in half.



Tim Kelleher, senior vice president of labor for Detroit Newspapers, said the deadline is real - and contended that the two newspapers are much better off than they were before the July 13, 1995, strike. Press manning, he said, has been reduced from as many as 10 workers per color press to five. The mail room operates with 150 full-time and 100 part-time employees, compared to 300 full-timers and 300 part-timers five years ago. "We put no new equipment in at all - and I pay lower wages now," Kelleher said.



Mailers President Young scoffed at the claim of efficiency, saying the papers achieved speed only because they do not stop the line to adjust for missed or extra inserts. Said Young, "Now they just run those machines flat-out."







Mark Fitzgerald (mfitzgerald@editorandpublisher.com) is editor at large for E&P.







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